The mission of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Penn Medicine is to promote and execute the highest quality research and education in the quantitative understanding of molecular mechanism in biology and medicine.

The Department is home to the largest concentration of expertise in modern quantitative biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology on campus – with faculty who are international leaders in these areas. The overarching goal of the Department is to use these disciplines to understand molecular mechanism in medicine and how to exploit this understanding for therapeutic purposes. Central to this mission is collaboration with other parts of the Penn research community. Ultimately, details of molecular mechanism underlie explanations of all disease processes and therapies. The Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics seeks to provide these explanations and to work with other scientists at Penn and elsewhere to exploit them in advancing biomedical research.

The faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics hold many awards and honors. The Department has two members of the National Academy of Sciences (Englander and Dreyfuss), one Fellow of the Royal Society of London (Dutton), two HHMI Investigators (Dreyfuss and Van Duyne), and two Fellows of the Biophysical Society (Wand and Englander). Recent awards include: 2012 Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (Lewis), 2012 Protein Society Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award (Lemmon), and Michael S. Brown New Investigator Award for 2012 (Shorter) and 2011 (Black).

The epigenome

WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

What do we call the collection of chemical compounds that modify, or mark, the genome that tells it what to do, where to do it, and when to do it?